


Paternity

by gunlord500



Category: Phoenix Point (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Julian Gollop - Freeform, Lovecraftian Monster(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-23 20:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20214259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gunlord500/pseuds/gunlord500
Summary: A paternity test isn't the only way to tell who your kids are...





	Paternity

Paternity

My wife and I had been having problems even before the Samudr Flu started spreading like crazy. Marriage wasn’t so bad at first, but then she started complaining about me spending too much time at work, then I found out she’d been flirting with an old flame on Facebook, and since that was when she’d gotten pregnant, you can imagine why we’d been sleeping in separate rooms for the past few months.

Why didn’t I just divorce her, give the kid a paternity test and jet if it wasn’t mine? I could have, and probably should have, but I guess I was just too soft. I’d gotten the papers prepared, even called up a lawyer, but that was when the flu hit our little coastal town, and my wife came down with it. Even if she had been cheating, I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I just abandoned her on her deathbed. And if she kicked the bucket when the baby still had four months or so to go, well, that was another thing I wouldn’t have to worry about. Yeah, it sounds harsh, but the flu was all sorts of contagious, and I figure if she had it, and if she’d die from it, the same would happen to the kid. Hell, at the time I thought it was dead in the womb already.

You’d think that would’ve been cause to take her to the hospital. Well, the hospital was closed. Everything was. This disease was a little more than your underpaid, fresh-outta-med-school scrub could handle, especially when he and all his colleagues came down with it and joined their patients at the bottom of the sea. That was a hell of a sight, by the way. Our house was right next to the beach, and I’ll never forget watching my personal MD, stethoscope still hanging from his neck, marching into the waves alongside the rest of the hospital staff—and a few of my neighbors, too. And since my wife was so sick and so pregnant, she was in no condition to move, not when the next nearest hospital was miles away. So I thought I’d make her last days as comfortable as I could, even if I avoided her as much as possible—both to keep from catching what she had, and because at this point we felt nothing for each other.

That had been the plan for the last few months. I’d bring her meals from the vast stores of preserved food I’d been saving up, then leave her alone to enjoy them—as much as she could—while her coughing got worse and her belly got bigger. As for me, I’d just take walks along the beach—really nice place when nobody’s around—or read in the study.

That’s what I was doing the night the baby came.

I was poring over an old _Newsweek _article on the national debt, before the U.S split up, when I heard something coming from my wife’s room. She was _singing_—she almost never did that, except once at a karaoke bar during our honeymoon, and it was for the best she hadn’t made any further attempts. But now I could hear her crooning the words to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” just loud enough to hear on the other side of our home’s thin wall. And under that song, there was something else. A sort of gurgling, mewling noise, almost like you’d think a kitten would sound if someone had filled its lungs with water.

If it was just the singing, I would’ve thought the flu was in its final stages and my wife was having a fever dream. But I’d never heard anything like the gurgling before. So I knocked on her bedroom door. No answer, just the singing. So I turned the doorknob—it wasn’t locked, and I could just walk right in. As I did, out of habit I flicked on the light—it hadn’t occurred to me that my wife had been singing a lullaby in a pitch-black room.

The first thing I noticed when the light came on was all the blood. Her bed was covered in it, and it was pooling on the floor, mixed with clumps of a gooey black substance I might have thought to be afterbirth were it not for the smell, a combination of saltwater and rotting fish. As I looked up from the fetid mixture, I saw my wife herself, propped up by the headboard and cradling a child to her chest.

I would have thought it was a normal, healthy baby at first if I hadn’t seen the source of the gurgling noises it was making. All the blood on the floor wasn’t entirely a product of the birth. The upper portion of my wife’s nightie had been torn away, so desperate was the infant to get at her breasts.

But it was eating, not drinking.

As my wife continued to sing to him, the baby turned to look at me. His legs and arms could have passed as human, but not his mouth. He had no lips or teeth—just a vertical hinge with serrated edges, like a crab’s. And from those serrations dripped a slurry of blood and fat, the masticated remains of my wife’s left breast.

At last, my wife stopped singing and looked at me. She smiled, not even noticing the gaping wound in her chest, and held the baby out to me.

I coughed—that had been happening a lot, recently—and almost without thinking, took a look at the lesions that had appeared on my arm the day before yesterday. And then I took the baby from his mother, and grinned as he mewled and whined, the hinges of his mouth clacking together as they moved back and forth.

Maybe, just maybe, the boy was mine after all.


End file.
